The Agentic CTO · Ben Jones
Merged. One full-time engineer. A product with real customers.
That engineer is me. I’ve rebuilt how we ship around agents, and I help CTOs and technical founders do the same with their teams.
One production repo, including small PRs, docs and maintenance. How I count it →
Work with me
Your team has the AI tools. If delivery still waits for you to brief, review and chase every change, we look at where it gets stuck and what to fix first.
We review your actual workflow, agree the next changes and measure whether they help. I coach you through the technical and people decisions as your team puts them into practice.
We’ve worked together before? Let’s pick this up again. Reply to my email and tell me what’s changed in the team.
The playbook
Six parts, plus the foundation. Start with Part 0 for the harness and build order, or Part 1 for how the team runs.
part 0 · the foundation
Agent = model + harness. You rent the model; the harness is the part you own. Here is ours, product names included: the contract, the nine gates on main, the QA agent's cost curve, and the bill — about $1.40 per merged PR.
part 1 of 6
640 PRs merged in one month, one full-time engineer. The six-step SDLC you already run — with agents doing every role and humans holding two gates.
part 2 of 6
Every merged PR teaches the system something. Maintenance loops that let the org find and fix its own bottlenecks — built in a day, debugging itself by lunch.
part 3 of 6
Incidents, alerts and inbound bugs. The reaction ladder agents climb while you sleep, the weekend our pager stayed silent, and the backlog that triages itself.
part 4 of 6
Blast radius beats cleverness: a free-fire staging zone, read-versus-write production, a break-glass agent behind MFA — and why your ticket tracker is an attack surface.
part 5 of 6
Block put a coding agent in 5,000 hands. The review data shows why most orgs that open the repo will drown — and why the gates from parts 1–4 are the whole difference.
part 6 of 6
The greybeards are correct about AI code quality and the worried are correct that the org changes. You don't win either group with hype — you win them with a harness and honest maths.